digitalmars.D - Safety of casting away constness instead of using postblit
- Jonathan M Davis (20/20) Oct 15 2010 Okay. Bug http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4867 is turning ...
Okay. Bug http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4867 is turning out to be a _big_ problem for the code that I'm working on at the moment. That combined with various bugs with regards to invariants is making dealing with const for certain things extremely difficult. In this case, I have a struct which is a value type. It holds a long and a Rebindable which holds an immutable object. It _should_ be copyable without a postblit constructor, but the compiler apparently isn't smart enough to figure that out and complains up the wazoo. And thanks to the aforementioned bug, I can't _have_ a postblit. Bleh. I can almost solve the problem on some level by creating a variable and then assigning to it with an overloaded opAssign(), except that the init for the struct type violates its invariant, so opAssign() blows up (maybe opAssign() shouldn't care about invariants...). The only thing that I can think of (beyond giving up on const for some portions cast that casts away the constness of the struct. The question is whether this is safe. Since it's a struct, it should do a bit for bit copy, which should be totally valid, so I _think_ that it's safe, but I'd like to be sure. Does anyone know for sure if casting away constness like that would be safe? - Jonathan M Davis
Oct 15 2010